April 20, 2011: To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's
deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble's eye at an especially
photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger
of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is
distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of
the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a
composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17,
2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of
wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the
spectrum.

Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard Discovery's STS-31
mission. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of
current astronomical research from planetary science to cosmology.